I bought a second hand Netgear r6300V2 router from online as it’s one of the officially supported models from dd-wrt. It’s installed with Merlin firmware when I received it, but as Merlin is a new thing to me and I have been searching and testing dd-wrt for a while, I decided to switch it to dd-wrt though Merlin is also supported for Astrill applet.
I downloaded the corresponding dd-wrt firmware for r6300V2 from the website, both the .chk file and the .bin upgrade file. When I upgraded the firmware with the .chk file, I got another error like this:
I tried with several other versions but got this same error. I talked to the vendor and he said I can not upgrade the router directly to dd-wrt from Merlin and I need to revert it back to the factory firmware of Netgear first. He sent me the back-to-ofw file but I got the same error when trying to upgrade to this firmware.
Hmm, so it seems I need to force the Netgear factory firmware with nmrpflash. It mainly involves two commands:
nmrpflash.exe -Lto find the network card number connected to the router and then
nmrpflash.exe -i net* -f R6300v2-V1.0.4.52_10.0.93.chkThe trick here is before I run the second command, I need to power down the router and right after I send this command, I need to power on the router.
After the command is run successfully, the router will be rebooted and then I get the Netgear router setup page where I need to set up the basic information, like admin account and password, Wireless network SSID and password, etc. After all this is done, I am ready to upgrade the firmware to dd-wrt.
The next steps are easier as I just follow the instructions from dd-wrt for Netgear router and after the upgrade is done, I get the router running on dd-wrt without any issue. And now coming the most important part: Astrill applet installation. And it works!!
Cool. At least I get it running now. The next step is I will change some of the settings to better meet my daily needs for the network, both for life and work. But this project can be called done now.